Heard in the train between Geneva and Gstaadt: "Have you heard what I told you yesterday in WoW?" [World Of Wacraft] "hmm?" "I told you five times that I'll visit you this afternoon to give her present to Cathy"
Acroe is a company that does haptic interfaces such as the following ones:
Since the first haptic device designed in 1976 by the ACROE laboratory, the first prototype of ERGOS was designed and built in 1988, and was mainly dedicated to artistic applications. This third version of ERGOS, using an innovative actuators design, opens a new dimension in your experience of haptics.
ERGOS is a top-of-the-range technology, designed to provide you a crisp sensation of your virtual models, and to enact them at best. The electromagnetic technology is currently the best for haptic devices requiring high spatial resolution, high dynamics, and a very large force amplitude vs. maximum force ratio. It provides a powerful solution to applications requiring dexterous gesture skills, high precision, and a crisp sensation of the manipulated model. This is a compact solution for the use of a high quality haptic device system in a small environment.
Why do I blog this? what can be designed using a 6D joystick? well I am not that into haptics but rather inetrested by the user experience of gestures to control digital environments.
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It's always good to think about past instance of technological artifacts. For example, look at the two turtles created by Grey Walter. Also called "Machina Speculatrix", the turtles have an curious history: |
Over fifty years ago W. Grey Walter started building three wheeled, turtle like, mobile robotic vehicles. These vehicles had a light sensor, touch sensor, propulsion motor, steering motor, and a two vacuum tube analog computer. Even with this simple design, Grey demonstrated that his turtles exhibited complex behaviors. He called his turtles Machina Speculatrix after their speculative tendency to explore their environment. The Adam and Eve of his robots were named Elmer and Elsie ( ELectro MEchanical Robots, Light Sensitive. ) (...) His robots were unique because, unlike the robotic creations that preceded them, they didn't have a fixed behavior. The robots had reflexes which, when combined with their environment, caused them to never exactly repeat the same actions twice. This emergent life-like behavior was an early form of what we now call Artificial Life.
Grey reported the robots path as follows:.
Why do I blog this? because these robots looks amazing for different reasons: (1) there not that zoomorphic (I don't believe the added value of a robot lies in the isomorphism with an animal), (2) the way the behavior of the robot works is based on an artifical intelligence model that I found more interesting than other devices).
An interview of Ralph Koster in RealMMO addresses some interesting question regarding MMORPG:
I think WoW sets us back only in specific ways. I think it moves us forward in other specific ways. Blizzard, as usual, nailed polish, nailed guiding the player, nailed a look and feel. They took the old formula and put it in really snazzy bottles. That’s what they do best, and they are very very good at it – the best in the industry. But they also didn’t pick up the ball and run with a lot of stuff that are growing trends in the MMO industry today – and what’s more, given their expertise, they probably never will. We’re seeing a lot of interest in stuff like user-created content, in-world economies in games like Eve Online, and so on, and we don’t see anything that sophisticated in WoW. WoW is very much a “theme park” sort of world, one which is about putting you on a ride and letting you experience it. (...) I hope the next big thing is what we’re working on! If I had to sum it all up in one world, it’s “choice.” One of the things about the more directed games is that they really don’t give you choice. “You pays your money, you takes yer ride.” You don’t get to hop off midway or try out different ways to play. And while pretty much everyone enjoys a theme park ride at least once, the number of people who come back to it over and over is relatively limited compared to the broader array of activities in the world. We lose sight of the fact that WoW is big, but MySpace dwarfs it.
Why do I blog this? because this interview of Koster starts scratching the surface of some avenues MMO that should be pertinent to explore. However, user-created content in an MMO can also be thought as very similar to the object creation in MUDs (the only differences here are that it's in 3D and that it can be sold).
Julian kept talking me about this mobzombies project (by William Carter, Aaron Meyers, William Bredbeck):
MobZombies explores a new dimension of handheld gaming by adding motion awareness to classic arcade style gameplay. Using a handheld device, and a custom motion sensor, players enter a virtual world infested with pixel-art zombies (a homage to vintage 8-bit console games). The goal of the game is to stay alive, running away from or planting bombs to destroy the ever-encroaching zombies. The twist is that a player's physical position controls the position of their zombie-world avatar, forcing the player to actually move around the real world to succeed in the game.The virtual zombie-world is a simple environment -- the game's complexity comes from players having to negotiate real-world objects in order to avoid the zombies and stay alive. The scoring system is simple: the longer you can stay alive, the higher your score. Of course, the longer you stick around, the more zombies you'll encounter.
Why do I blog this? that's a good way to connect the materiality of 1st life (with tangible interactions) and a second life instance. Since I am interested into gestural grammar of interactions, this seems to be a relevant platform to explore.
A dish washer that has been trashed with clothes still inside. One of the critical externalities of the our techno-material world... one hour later in the night the device has been removed... soon to be hijacked by silent and tech-savy wizards who operate at the heart of our cities.
Pay attention to these artifacts on the street... In this case the engine might very well be used soon for quite different purposes (like those people ripping off steal/metal parts and selling them).
Not very well structured thoughts on the LIFT07 talks about ubiquitous computing. There was a dedicated session about it with Julian Bleecker, Ben Cerveny and Adam Greenfield but some other talks can also be considered as part of that topic (Frédéric Kaplan, Fabien, Girardin, Jan Chipchase).
| Adam Greenfield, thoughtfully get back to the definition of ubiquitous computing; starting by explaining the horrible terms (pervasive computing, ambient intelligence...) that lead to the neologism Everyware. Adam's talk was a must-see/read/listen/... about the user experience of Everyware ("information processing invested in the objects and surfaces of the everyday"). |  |
Adam gave some examples and moved to the discussion about the upside and downside of people's experience of these technologies. As opposed to his book that starts from more positive aspects, Adam started here with the drawbacks, using a Jeremy Bentham's panopticon to show the foucauldian consequences of Ubiquitous Computing. He exemplified how the data streams produced by our interactions with those systems are colonizing our everyday life and that there are risks about who control them. From the designer's point of view, he showed 3 aspects that are important to consider: people make mistakes (pressing wrong buttons...), inadvertent or unwilling use happens and there are concurrency issues (when technology is everywhere there can be interactions between them: "the all is more than the sum of the parts"). The upside Adam describes concerns how these technologies enable to dissolve into behavior and become transparent (especially as physical manifestations). So, why this is an important? I really like Adam's perspective on ubicomp, it's very balanced and the way he discussed the advantages and drawbacks resonates. I was very interested by his discussion about how machines can derive knowledge from inference and how users can determine that these inferences has been made or they could be seen as invalid. That's a topic I find important, in terms of the research I did about automating location-awareness.
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Ben Cerveny then gave us a metaphorical talk called "The Luminous Bath: our new volumetric medium" in which he described the user experience of ubiquitous computing. Ben showed how we live in a luminous bath: the spilling out of information onto physical space; and this is very attention demanding. His talk was about using this metaphor to describe the characteristics of ubiquitous computing. |
The first one that struck my mind was "Memotaxis" (maybe because my previous background is in biology), referring to the process of self-organization enabled by the fact that objects gather meta-data. The aggregation of those "morphologies" (that others describes as "mash-ups" make then intelligible. He also used notions of accretions (continuum between an object and a medium), signalling (flows of data are produced not only by mobile objects and ambient displays but also by whatever objects), schooling ("a fish does not know what the school looks like..." meaning that the organisation on a group level is not comprehensible to the members), decanting (distilling information into something less fluid), crystallizing (creation of temporary structure of information) or acculturation ( emergence of practices from being immersed in the environment). So, why this is an important? Ben's talk are always high level (with super-nice slides) and that one was in the same vein. Such metaphors are pertinent in the sense that it allows to move the ubiquitous problem (mostly context-aware computing as described in this IFTF report) into a different semantic description. This allows to rethink the issues and provide some food for thoughts for designers. Tom Hume has a good take on the topic (see his blogpost) by explaining that people attach/categorize meaning to artifacts and record it digitally. The categories created can be aggregated and the information then blend in the environment. What happens in the end is that users could not see this from the inside but can only get the meaning from the interactions.
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The day before, Frédéric Kaplan presented his "Beyond robotics" talk, which addressed the notion of ubiquitous computing form the robot side [yes I include robotics in ubicomp because in the end there is more and more convergence between communicating objects and robots]. |
Frédéric explained different ideas to go beyond current robotics. First, he showed how his former team and himself improved the learning capabilities of the Sony AIBO by implementing a "curiosity algorithm" that allowed the robot to learn how to interact in various environments (walking, swimming...). Second, the discussion about artifacts adapted to the robot morphology (and not linked to a specific usage) was a way to innovate: bikes, water suits. Third, and maybe more interestingly, Frédéric posited that the crux point was to use the history of interactions of the robots with its owners and the environment [very well into the blogject line, I fully concur!]. This connects to what Adam described about prediction that can be made on data collected by the artifact (a topic also addressed by Nathan Eagle in his presentation). According to Frédéric, the point is to use this history of interaction to build predictions, something that artificial intelligence knows how to do for ages. So, why this is an important? In the end, one of the bit he brought to the audience was an open question about what should be one using these ideas. He actually questioned the "calm computing paradigm" to propose the idea of "chili computing": the ones that surprise, stun the users by providing disruptions in the context. This is close to the idea of rude tutor I described last week; I really enjoy when my Nabaztag starts being rude by saying that the party sucks or that we should really go having lunch.
| In his presentation entitled "What Happens When 1st Life Meets 2nd Life? How To Live In A Pervasively Networked World", Julian Bleecker described the bridges between "first life" (aka the physical world) and "second lives" (i.e digital environments ranging from MMORPG to blogs, IM, etc.). |  |
His point was that we should be mindful of the material character of what happens digitally: 2nd life worlds have a material basis in there (just as Amazon has huge facilities from which they ship their books) and first life resources support and maintain the digital second lives. Julian additionally brought forward the important notion of embodiment (as opposed to the sedentary attitude of sitting on couches in front of computer screens). Then he described the more pragmatic implications of these statements: the physical environment is important for different reasons: as opposed to digital environments, there can't be any reboot, server updates/scale-up, once our health/body is harmed, we can't create a new one, there is only one possible world that we can inhabit, etc. Julian's stance was therefore that the development of second worlds/digital environments should take material contingencies seriously. He exemplified this through three elements that can be used to bridge 1st/2nd lives: motion (the wii controller is a physical experience), time (in Animal Crossing, the environment is different depending on the seasons) and distance (in Teku Teku Angel, the pedometer allows to use player's movement in space to control a tamagotchi-like creature. So, why this is an important? first bridging 1st and 2nd lives is a powerful was to think about innovative applications. Second, and more importantly, there is really an interesting paradigm shift here. If you think about the Metaverse-like digital worlds (read "Snow Crash" for that matter, Steaphenson described a clear model of separated environments; whereas in what Julian highlighted, there are inter-interelations and cross-pollination between them. I quite like this approach and the underlying reasons to adopt it are very valuable and pertinent. You can read more about this on Julian's blog and from the upcoming work of the Near-Future Laboratory.
| During the open-stage Fabien presented an insightful account of how the technological world is messy: "Embracing the real world's messiness". As Frédéric with the idea of chili computing, Fabien questioned the calm computing paradigm and discussed how it is possible for ubicomp to cope with the inherent messiness of our physical world. |  |
Nurtured by tons of examples in the form of pictures taken with his cameraphone, he exemplified what happens: infrastructures break down, standards are different even for things as basic as plugs, competing technologies co-exist, ownership of enabling technologies is fragmented, biased are cultural and contexts are unpredictable. To bridge this world with ubicomp, Fabien presented the idea of "seamful computing" by Matthew Chalmers (revealing limits, inaccuracies, seams and boundaries so that people can adapt) and how to design for user's appropriation (see what I posted about it here). So, why this is an important? working closely with Fabien this is really an ongoing discussion, I am also convinced by the fact that the world is messy and that design should take this into account. What I would upon this, is the notion of aging and dirtiness that could be added on top of the problems of technologies. A last thing I found nice in Fabien's talk was that he described the seams using photo taken from a cameraphone... which of course are not that nice and fluid... because they exemplify the reality of technology. This reminds me an excerpt from Sherry Turkle's book:
I took my seven-year-old daughter, Rebecca, on a vacation in Italy where we went on a boat ride in the Mediterranean; it could have been a simulation because it looked like a post card. She saw a creature in the water, pointed to it and says, "Look Mommy, a jellyfish! It looks so realistic!" (...) told this story about Rebecca and the realistic jellyfish to my friend Danny Hillis, who is a Disney Fellow. He responded to this story by describing what happened when Animal Kingdom, the new branch of the Disney theme parks, opened in Orlando. The animals are real; they are the ones that bleed. So he said that right after it opened, the visitors to the park are asked during a debriefing"what did you enjoy?" The visitors complained that the animals weren't realistic enough -- the animals across the street in Disney World were much more realistic.
Finally, a relevant way to design with this in mind is to follow what Jan Chipchase is doing with his user experience research (field research using ethnographical methods). Though what he presented was not about ubiquitous computing, it's very relevant anyway. Jan described his research about illiterate users and showed how the reality is a complex system in which even illiterate manage to carry out difficult activities.
So, why this is an important? a common link between Jan's talk and what has been discussed about ubiquitous computing is the idea of delegation. AI and ubicomp research indeed deploy technologies that aims at assisting users or automating certain process. What Jan discussed in his presentation was that illiterate users are obliged to delegate things and task. He questioned the fact that we can delegate to technology rather than to people, a very compelling topic to me.
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"The Atomic Chef: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error" (Steven Casey) |
This book, reviewed by Scott Schappel in American Scientist aims at showing "how design and technology all too often leave unwitting humans on the brink of disaster". Some excerpts of the review:
Written in the style of a thriller by Tom Clancy or Dan Brown, these vignettes skillfully draw the reader into the world of human error and design flaws. But Casey isn't writing fiction—these 20 stories and the characters involved are all too real, and some of the facts he reports are chilling. (...) There are lessons to be learned from all of these accounts, from the chapter about a California freeway driver fed up with traffic to the story of a near-catastrophic nuclear explosion. Casey doesn't offer remedies for the design and technological flaws he presents. But that may not be a failing at all—in some dark and twisted way, leaving the reader to ponder how to fix things may make the book even more compelling and useful. After all, real life doesn't hand us easy solutions.
Why do I blog this? seems to be a must read for people embracing the real world's messiness.
Those splinted lines that you see in this tunnel make me think about the near future: interlaced scenarios of moments yet to come. Different possibilities, histories, inflexion points and beakthroughs. This exactly depicts some elements we tackled at the LIFT07 workshop about "designing the future": the thinking about "when change happens".
This is one of the crux element we have to tackle while doing critical foresight: unfolding the history backward from and end point to now, by describing what happenned in the forms of changes/events. The lines here can be seen as a metaphor of two different histories that unfold.
(The pic has been taken on my way to the moutains for a snowboarding trip, a sortof postLIFT07 moment)
Yesterday in the NYT, a pertinent article about PARC strategy. It basically describes PARC's path to move from being a in-house research lab to a subsidiary form. The article shows on-going projects but more interestingly critiques the fact that PARC is a "lab of missed opportunities":
Early in the decade, a struggling Xerox Corporation was trying to sell off a stake in its Palo Alto Research Center, which it could no longer afford to support. But with the technology bubble bursting, the price that investors were willing to pay for a piece of PARC, as the center is known, kept going down.So in 2002, Xerox switched to Plan B: it spun off the center into an independent subsidiary and sought to prove that it could sustain itself by licensing technology and forming partnerships with outside companies. On Friday, PARC is announcing a deal that underscores that strategy. It is licensing a broad portfolio of patents and technology
“There’s no way anyone can top what they did in the past in terms of dramatic research developments,” said the futurist Paul Saffo, a fellow at the Institute for the Future. But Mr. Saffo praised PARC for finding a business model that has allowed it to survive at a time when many research groups at American corporations are being cut.
“This is an organization that has done well at keeping researchers, and spinning out a steady stream of little products,” Mr. Saffo said. “PARC has been a very quiet success.”
I am currently participating in LIFT07 (as a co-organizer). Great speakers, cool audience. This year I chose to take no notes and try to do a write-up afterwards only with what my brain cells would have retained.
Via: an impressive Doraemon game for kids:
Doreamon has a cool gadget, the Yojigame Pocket (4th dimension pocket), in which he stores just about anything from cars to houses and planes. He also has a helicopter hairband that his friends can use for flying. Epoch has released a video game based on this helicopter hairband! Inspired by the Wii remote controller, the player uses a hairband to control his/her character by moving his/her head in all directions
Why do I blog this? that's an impressive game controller: it allows users to control Doraemon as the character flies through the air using a helicopter strapped unto the head (lean the head forward to go forward, lean the head back to move back, and tilt the head to go sideways)
Today starts the LIFT07 conference with a day devoted to workshops. Along with Bill Cockayne (Stanford Center for Critical Foresight), we co-organized a session entitled "Re-Designing the City of the Future".
This workshop will begin in the use of existing futures and critical foresight methods to understand how the future is being envisioned. Then using design research tools, participants will design social, technical, and business innovations that could exist in 2015 and 2025 regarding the future of the City. Key skills will be the integration of analysis with experience, foresight with design thinking, and building and communicating prototypes for the future.
More about that later.
I had the pleasure to set a seminar at Media and Design Lab (EPFL) today with Jan Chipchase. Jan gave a talk was about user experience methods, exemplified by rural charging services in Uganda, informal repair cultures and design for illiterate users.
what market will it be in 20 years(for nokia)? it could be media, search.. one way of framing what I do: human-centered design, creating things that people wants and needs thinking about the range of contexts in which people will use cell phones cell phone = last thing teenagers interact with before going to bed need to be in those contexts to understand those needs multicultural studies all over the worldpb = people are suspicious of large corporations so collect/treat data in a ethical way
going in a place for a couple of weeks, researching a particular theme, time pressure, and leave and getting information back to the company, which is the most difficult thing (even more than the field research per se)
use the data to inspire and inform the development team having hooks to bring people in the research: for example weird stories/anecdotes, it's successful when people starts smiling about that. need to engage people in research material, compete with other analysts' write-ups figure out what the future looks like invent new stuff, patents (technologically oriented)... give designers insights about people's life
in-depth field research: lives with peopel a few days, following them... every interaction with people/places seen as an opportunity tohave a research theme for example: buy a bike and ride, meet people 90% of interactions are successul, people are happy to comunicate and share lots of shadowing: following people (asking them before) little bit of danger: hurricane (katrina), naughty dogs street surveys "do you mind if I take some pictures?" street pictures of
problem for places where we can't go: use of diary but it does not work, people reinterprete what they're asked to do, so figured out other methods like everything i touch diary: take a picture of everything you touch in one day; even though we're not interested in everything they touch, things sneak in
mystery shopper: pretend to be a shopper; smash a nokia phone and ask a shop to repair it and document the way it is repaired.
Rural charging services, Uganda: dig up examples like banking practices over phones (sente) turn anyone with a cell phone in an ATM machine
is nokia can be supportive? is there a business here?
need to be humble when designing
Informal repair cultures the ecosystem: looking at what happen on the streets when people fix stuff researchers buy those rip.offs, amazing quality in India: pretty much any mobile phone shops has a booth in the back where phones can be repaired (Nokia does not want to control it) what is needed to repair a phone: a screwdriver, a toothbrush and knowledge can be torn apart on the streets with these tools vibrant second hand markets, sell parts, rip-off component supplies (keypads....)
what services do this ecosystem offer? mostly change the keypads circuit fixing re-soldering memories, boards language change software installation content movies unlocking (it goes without saying)
you can find repair manual of nokia phones (but it's not published by nokia), it's somewhat reverse observed/engineered for every new parts of a phone, it's documented online, how you can hack you can even get warranties for repaired stuff (on second hand batteries!)
buy stuff and send them to nokia engineers
india has a tradition about repair culture courses
what's novel? scale, cost, the cell phone: ubiquity of objects of repair (compare to other electronic) imported, grey market, stolen devices: things that need repairing... grey market services, fake accessories, risk of having stocks condiscated priority and speed of what is repaired (tv or laptop?)
implications for consumers: informal repair cuture is largely convenient, cheap and fast reduces total cost of ownership for existing consumers makes phones ownership more affordable increasing the life-time of products consequently lowering the environmental impact (!?)
does Nokia can support this? MOtorola made the unscrewing of the phone back more easily could nokia redesign the product so that these guys can repair it more easily? discussion about whether this is good/bad for nokia; it's at least good for consumers!
phone as a way to travel in space and time
The Spatial Character of Sensor Technology is an academic paper by Stuart Reeves, Steve Benford, Andy Crabtree, Jonathan Green, Claire O’Malley and Tony Pridmore that interestingly propose a framework for analysing the intricate relationships between sensors and spatiality. As the authors point out, it discusses an important fact: the way seams between sensor-based devices such as Wifi or GPS create this spatial character and hence users' reactions.
Some excerpts I found pertinent concerned the examples given by the authors (these are raw excerpts, not very well understandable if you don't know the systems)
Example 1: the spatial character of the network as experienced by players was exploited and repurposed as part of the game. (...) The spatial character of this game arena was thus experienced as very much part of the game’s dynamic as players ‘discovered’ network coverage. (...) Example 2: Can You See Me Now: runners sometimes relied on ‘hiding’ in the GPS ‘shadows’ created by buildings obscuring satellites in order to obfuscate their position from online players until the last moment, when runners would then spring out from the shadows and ambush unsuspecting players. In this example, again, spaces in which interaction is impossible (i.e., GPS shadows) became an exciting and special dynamic within the game, deepening the playing experience rather than being a source of breakdown for runners and players to constantly repair. Here the spatial character was created by the contingencies of GPS coverage; this was experienced for runners as a developing “body of knowledge,” informing them of, for example, ‘good’ times of day for being in particular locations and appropriate places to ‘hide.’ (...) Example 3: Savannah: the invisibility of region boundaries (and occasionally the uncertainties of GPS) caused discrepancies between participants’ views of the action, and thus their ability to coordinate attacks successfully. (...) Example 4: MIT Media Lab’s Kidsroom: The spatial character of the room created by the sensor technology was thus not revealed to participants but was rather worked into the narrative in an endogenous fashion so that the children could be guided into the correct places.
The authors then describe a "spectrum of spatial character" based on those examples:
At one extreme end interaction and interference spaces are revealed to users who are expected to fully manage breakdown as part of their interaction, whereas at the opposing end, such interaction and interference spaces are hidden from the users, and they are guided through the spatial arrangement by the system in some way. Towards the centre are systems in which spatial aspects of interaction and interference are partially revealed, however users are provided with some system support to resolve breakdown. (...) It is thus possible that different design strategies could be appropriate for different demographics of users; for children, a designer may wish to intentionally hide seams for pedagogical reasons, or perhaps in order to create certain forms of experience, such as a “magical” system where the effects produced by the interface are exposed, but the underlying structure is hidden from the user.
Why do I blog this? because this is connected to my PhD research that deals with the link between spatiality and user experience of pervasive computing. The issues described here are very interesting in terms of what should be revealed to the users, surely an important paper for Fabien.
In the last issue of Strategy Business, there is a long in-depth interview of Alvin Toffler about his the book he wrote with his wife "Revolutionary Wealth". While the whole interview is a must-read for people interested in foresight, innovation, prosumer revolution and stuff like that, I was bemused by this excerpt:
S+B: When I looked at Future Shock recently, I was surprised at your stridence. You wrote of the acceleration of the pace of change as an illness, “a cancer in history.” With 35 years of hindsight, would you still describe our situation that way?TOFFLER: Well, I might tone down some of the language. I was 35 years younger. But I think the basic argument of the book stands. We’re always asked what we got wrong, and we did get a few things wrong. That’s inevitable when you’re looking 30 or so years ahead. The hardest thing to forecast is timing — when certain events would happen. We said, back then in 1970, that humanity would clone animals, and that has happened; we said that we would also clone humans, and I still think that’s likely. But we were wrong in the timing. We said that these would happen by 1985. We didn’t make that date up. We got it from one of the world’s leading Nobel Prize–winning biologists, who happened to be rather more optimistic than he should have been.
There’s another passage in the book where we talk about throwaway products, that someday we may be wearing paper clothing. And we aren’t. Yet.
I always get a laugh from an audience when I say, of course, we futurists have a magic button; we follow every statement about a failed forecast with “yet.”
Why do I blog this? the power of words always strikes me.
Via delicious, I ran across this short news in Times about playgrounds for elderly persons:
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The idea was hatched in Finland, where researchers have experimented with what they call “three-generational play”. |
Why do I blog this? that's relevant, when thinking about social cohesion and urban planning, why not devoting places for people that would enjoy such activities. Much of the energy is focused on kids playground, why not thinking about other users. This does not mean that it should be a parkour for elders but there is surely a design issue here.
Again, one of these report that piled up on my desk: the IGDA white paper about Alternate Reality Gaming is a very valuable document that describes ARG (background, relation to MMOG, mechanics, business models, etc).
ARGs do not require there be an avatar to build up, grow bored of and cast aside, or that there be a sandbox world for this creature to inhabit. There is, rather, the insertion of additional slices of reality into our own, and the only demand is that you interact with these as yourself. (...) The basic recipe for an ARG could be boiled down to Exposition + Interaction + Challenges (...) Exposition: The primary problem of storytelling in an ARG is how to convey expository information. In order to run an ARG, you need to present a cast of characters and their motivations, flesh out the world they live in, and deliver information about backstory and real-time story action simultaneously. (...) Blogs, audio/video, non-blog websites, other media. (...) Interaction: By "interaction" we mean both direct conversation with story characters and with the game world. Through interaction, players have the chance to influence the progress of the story even when there is no specific challenge at hand. (...) Chat, telephone, email, SMS/TXT, live events (...) Challenges: In a traditional video game, this would be the part labeled as ‘game play,’ in which the player shoots zombies, jumps over ravines, stacks blocks, etc. Challenges in an ARG take on varied forms, and are rarely very similar from challenge to challenge even within the same game. Cryptography, games, achievements, social engineering, puzzles.
Why do I blog this? the document is a good primer on the ARG topic with some applicable issues regarding game creation. Might be useful for a possible project about transmedia gaming.
A good story in Metroplis: Searching for the Future by Karrie Jacobs is about "figuring out what the twenty-first century looks like". Some excerpts I liked about this:
Some things are obvious (...) The aural landscape—punctuated by all manner of cell-phone rings and BlackBerry buzz—has changed more conspicuously than the physical scenery. Yet mostly what I notice is that other people are not noticing. (...) But then there’s only so much you can see from street level.(...) Some of the current popularity of satellite imagery—now readily available to anyone with a modicum of bandwidth—can be explained by a simple desire to see. (...) Manufactured Landscapes offers a handy synopsis of the extraordinary work Burtynsky did in China: he photographed the factories where the bulk of our consumer goods are manufactured, (...) I asked Burtynsky which of his photos best depicts the present moment. He replies, “The one Shanghai picture where it’s just this forest of skyscrapers is the one that, to me, stands as a sobering reminder of a world we’re creating.” (...) We’re all seduced by the pleasure of twenty-first-century life, but then there’s a payback.” Or maybe it’s the butterfly effect in reverse: a cell phone rings in New Jersey, and it causes an earthquake in China.
Sometimes "elephant paths" do not please people. As I explained here, this terms refers to paths that is formed in space by people making their own paths and shortcuts. Look at what happened in the "Parc des bastions" in Geneva:
Why do I blog this? from the user point of view, an elephant is interesting because it shows some explicit traces of people's intentions in space. Therefore, when you see these fences that tries to prevent people from having a shortcut, this makes me wondering whether what will happen. And since fences are only put on one side of the elephant path, there will be some interesting traces because people from the other side will still keep using it and change their trajectory only at the end of the path.
Now, if we think about virtual worlds, there are of course research works about walkthrough and shortcuts in video games (see Axel Stockburger's paper about discursive walkthrough which is somewhat related to that). But is there any instance of counter-elephant paths measures in MMORPG?